GardenA place is somewhere things live, and you can keep one before anything grows in it
Live · This works today.
Your places are listed on the Garden screen under Your places, including any with nothing in them. Tap one to open it, where you can rename it, say what kind it is, give it a size, or delete it. Add a place makes a new one from that list — you do not have to add a plant first — and it opens straight onto the new place so you can fill in the rest if you want to. A place you empty out stays; it reads nothing in it yet rather than disappearing.
Where your places live
On the Garden screen. Your plants are grouped by where they are, and underneath those groups is Your places — every place you have, including the ones holding nothing.
Tap any of them to open it. That screen is where a place is renamed, described and sized, and it is also where the plants currently in it are listed.
Making one
Add a place, at the foot of that list. It asks for a name and nothing else, then opens the place it just made.
Asking for only a name is deliberate. What a place fundamentally is — whether a porch and a pot are the same kind of thing at all — is still being worked out, and a name is the one answer that holds whichever way that lands. Everything else is optional and lives on the place’s own screen.
What is not built
No plan view. Places are a list, not a map. You cannot drag a bed around or say that the porch is south of the shed, and nothing in the app knows how your garden is arranged in space.
No sharing between places. Watering a bed logs against everything in it, but places do not otherwise interact — there is no sense in which two beds are next to each other.
Common questions
- The bed says twelve plants but there are only two rows in it. Which is right?
- **Twelve, and until 26 August 2026 it said two.** A row like *Bush bean ×6* is one entry and six beans. Every count on the Garden screen used to count entries and call them plants — so a bed holding four rows of six lettuce told you it had four plants, and the header of a garden holding 84 said 14. **Both numbers used the word plants and neither meant the same thing.** Now every count means plants. The header, each bed, each place in your list, the line about plants with no kind yet, and — the one that mattered most — **the warning before you delete a bed**, which used to tell you it would remove two things when it was about to remove twelve. **An entry with no number beside it counts as one.** That is what the screen already showed you: no × means one plant.
- Can I make a place before I have anything to put in it?
- **Yes, since 25 August 2026, and before that you could not.** A place only came into existence as a side effect of something else — naming a spot while adding a plant, or telling the chat about a bed. There was no way to simply make one. So somebody laying out their beds before planting had to invent a plant to hang each place off. **Garden → Your places → Add a place** takes a name and makes it, then opens the new place so you can add a size or say what kind it is if you feel like it. None of that is required; a place only needs a name.
- I made a place and it vanished. Where did it go?
- **It did not go anywhere, and until 25 August 2026 this was a real problem rather than a misunderstanding.** The garden screen grouped your plants by where they live, and a group with no plants in it was left out — sensibly, so the list is not padded with empty headings. The side effect was that **a place with nothing in it was invisible**, so making one appeared to do nothing at all. Places now have their own list further down the same screen, and it shows every one. An empty place reads **nothing in it yet**, which is a normal state and not an error.
- What can I change about a place?
- Tap it in **Your places** and you get its own screen: its **name**, what **kind** it is, and its **size** — width and length, depth for a raised bed, or gallons for a container. You can also delete it there. **Only the name is ever needed.** The rest is there because the app can use it — a bed's size is what a filling calculation needs, and whether something is in the ground or in a pot changes how fast it dries out — but a place with nothing but a name works everywhere in the app.
- How much soil does a new bed take, and what goes in it?
- Give a bed a width, a length and a depth and it works out how many bags — the number you need in the aisle, not a volume in cubic feet. It now also tells you how much of that should be compost: **a quarter to a half of it**, with the rest topsoil or a soilless growing mix. That share is a range because the four US extension services we checked give a range — Maryland, Utah State, Minnesota and Penn State all land between a quarter and a half, and none publishes a single figure. **Half is a ceiling rather than a target:** too much compost dries out and then repels water, which is the common and expensive way to get this wrong. What it will not do is hand you a three-way shopping list. What is under the bed changes the mix — turf, heavy clay and a patio each want something different — and we do not ask you that yet. Nothing we found states a fill for perennials either; every figure we hold is stated for vegetables.
- What happens to the plants if I delete a place?
- **They are deleted with it, and the app says so before it does anything.** Deleting a place counts what is inside first and names it — how many plants, and how many journal entries go with them — and you confirm that, or cancel. It is worth being plain about this: **you are not offered a choice about where the plants go.** The cascade is the thing you are consenting to. If you want to keep them, move them to another place first, or end them properly instead — **ending a plant and deleting one are different things on purpose**, and only one of them keeps your history.
- How do I know if a plant needs a stake or a trellis?
- **The app tells you while you are picking its spot, since 26 August 2026.** Add a plant that needs holding up and a line appears under **Where is it?** — *This plant needs support — a stake, cage or trellis.* It is there at that moment on purpose: **a support is easy to put in before the plant is in the ground and awkward afterwards**, when you are working around roots and stems that are already in your way. It names the need rather than the method, because the need is what we actually know. Twenty-four of our plants want holding up and they do not all want the same thing — a pole bean climbs netting, a young apple wants a stake, borage simply flops. **You can see which one yours is; we would only be guessing.** **It says nothing at all for most plants.** That is the point. A note that appeared on everything is a note you would stop reading.
- Does the name matter, or should I use proper names like Bed 1?
- **Whatever you call it out loud.** The app groups everything by where it sits, so the name you type is the name you will read on every list — *back bed*, *front porch*, *big pot by the door*. There is nothing to match and no format to get right. If you name a place that already exists, the app adds to that one rather than making a second with the same name.
Shipped 2026-08-25. Last checked 2026-08-26. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us — support docs going stale is a bug.